Rather than amassing personal data and holding on to it as long as legally possible, companies such as Google should allow the data to degrade over time, according to researchers.
In an interview with the BBC this week, Dutch researcher Harold van Heerde discussed his work on the idea of allowing data to becomes less specific over time. Letting the specifics gradually disappear could protect consumer privacy while also meeting the needs of service providers, he said.
For example, in the case of location information in a service provider’s database, van Heerde said that specific GPS co-ordinates could gradually be exchanged for a street name, followed by a post-code and then only a city name. “You can slowly replace details with a more general value,” he explained.
The work carried out by van Heerde into data usage was outlined in a recent paper A framework to balance privacy and data usability using data degradation published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.
“Data degradation gives users and service providers a fine grained control over the price to be paid, in terms of privacy risks, and to optimise their common interest: balancing privacy and data usability,” the paper states.
The paper specifically names companies which it believes could benefit from the technology. “Google can reach over half a billion unique individuals each year, collecting—among many different types of personal data—their search queries, which to a high extent encapsulate their daily lives,” the paper explains.
Google is currently being investigated by European and US authorities over the recent WiSpy incident in which information was collected by the company’s Street View camera cars.
Facebook has also come in for criticism of late for its privacy policies. The company recently made a major overhaul of its privacy systems. Facebook is also facing a challenge in the shape of Diaspora which hopes to use a more open approach to privacy to encourage users away from the social networking giant.
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When I store my information on Google, in email, on facebook, ETC, I don't want it to DEGRADE. It can degrade just fine if it's in my head. I put it on a computer specifically because I want it to STICK AROUND... that's what a computer is for.
The internet is for sharing, not for privacy. Yeah it's great when we can protect privacy, I'm all for that, but you do that by keeping the information away from the wrong people (eg corporations, advertising interests, the media, stalkers, ...), not by destroying it once the wrong people don't even care anymore anyway.
Unless you give users a VERY high granularity of control over this technology, it is nothing less than erasing vital parts of their lives.
Scott: You missed the point of van Heerde’s idea. He proposes that the information collected about you degrade, not the information you store online. This is not information users have any control over in the first place. Which is the point.
Sounds to me like slight of digital hand to trick people into being more comfortable about being digitially naked online. We all know that no matter what "happens" to that info in terms of public viewing, Google will still have it somewhere should any future totalitarian government or Google itself, once sentient, have a need to access it.